


Negatives

by El Staplador (elstaplador)



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Community: ladiesbingo, Depressing, F/F, Memory Wipe, Time Travel, separated by timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-30 15:20:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5168732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/pseuds/El%20Staplador
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Actually, Isobel supposed, chasing Zoe into the twenty-first century was exactly what she was doing; just not fast enough ever to catch her.<br/>(Rated T for one instance of strong language)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Negatives

**Author's Note:**

> For the ladiesbingo square 'It wasn't meant to be'

Isobel wondered, sometimes, what she would have done if she'd _known_. If she had understood, deep in the fibres of her being, that she would never see Zoe again, if she'd known that they would end up stuck at opposite ends of the timeline, with no hope of ever meeting, would she have followed her into the Doctor's phone box? Would she have chased her into the twenty-first century?

Actually, Isobel supposed, chasing her into the twenty-first century was exactly what she was doing; just not fast enough ever to catch her.

It couldn't ever happen. The laws of physics had been bent and stretched just far enough to allow the two of them to meet, and now they had snapped back into place and even her uncle had no idea how to go about bending them again. Isobel had to go the long way round, and she knew that there was no way she would make it in time.

Zoe was gone. Zoe hadn't happened yet. Even if by some miracle of modern medicine Isobel lasted long enough into the next century to meet her again, even if she was faithful to Zoe's memory for all those years to come (and she was fairly sure that Zoe would say that wasn't a logical way to go about things), she wouldn't be the girl Zoe would remember. There would be a lifetime between them. It had already been five years. Isobel had learned and grown and changed; while her photographs of Zoe made her smile wistfully, her photographs of herself made her cringe.

Things were changing, and Isobel was part of that in spite of herself. She got involved in the politics without even meaning to; she'd vaguely assumed that being queer was part of being an artist, apart from her dolly soldier, of course, but maybe he was part of being queer too. (When, after about a decade, she heard the term 'bisexual', it all made sense, and that was another way to think about it all, but it didn't really make any difference in the end.) She never meant her photographs to be political, but somehow she couldn't help it; they all had a sort of 'fuck you, I am who I am' vibe to them. Zoe had swept in with her spacegirl insouciance and had taught her about not giving a damn about what other people thought, and now she was gone and she had left Isobel feeling ahead of her own times and behind Zoe's.

It might have been easier, she thought guiltily, if Zoe had died. There was an established form for that. She'd grieve. People would be sympathetic. She'd get over it. She'd move on. As it was, she could never quite let go of the memory of someone who wasn't even born yet. Talk about cradle-snatching.

The twentieth century rolled on to its close. Film gave way to digital, and Isobel wasn't sure whether suddenly being able to take a thousand shots at a time made her a better photographer or a worse one. There had been a certain elegant tightness about the form when she'd been restricted to a roll of thirty-six, but now she was free to experiment, and she was enjoying it. The space race stalled. Maybe, Isobel thought with a sudden chill, something had gone wrong; maybe it wasn't going to happen; maybe Zoe wasn't ever going to be born. Although at this point it really wasn't going to make any difference, because Isobel really was too old for her now.

But it happened, she told herself. She remembered it, so it must have happened.

She thought that perhaps if she'd had a chance to spend longer with Zoe, if she'd hitched a ride in the TARDIS or if she'd persuaded Zoe to stay a year or so, she would have had a chance to finish things off. From where she was now, she couldn't see that she and Zoe would have lasted very long; they'd have had some fun and then wandered off in different directions to explore other parts of the universe. But she'd have liked a chance to try.

She invested in a fire-proof safe, not to keep her jewellery in (she didn't have any worth mentioning) but to protect her negatives. They were her legacy, and they were all she had left of a person who did not yet exist.

***

A century away, Zoe Heriot woke with an indefinable sense of something being wrong; of having been away from the Wheel and yet not of having left it; of everything having changed and of nothing being different. Deep within her, something stirred, something that could not be called a memory, an absence that seemed never to have been a presence.

Zoe wept, and did not know why.


End file.
